SMOOTH NERD

Ragged the night came, lonely like a two wick candle burning on a three-inch book of world mythology.

I saw her through the spackled window it’s frosting dried, sunburnt, a maze of flaking cracks. The sun sat high against our city’s western face, her hair gleaming-gold framing lips that spoke without moving. Rouge Lust: Whispers gather where she walks, only the camera’s flash is brighter than her star. 

A man with a sax crosses my path on the plaza, white fleece draped like a cape round his bent shoulders. His music melts into the fountain’s roar. The clash is silent, abrupt.

Ahead, a skateboard hits the marbled steps —CLAKT!— night traffic rolls past, lonely headlights flash,fade and blend into depressed taillights.

A pair of pigeons taps the cold cement, one of them missing a leg. Limbless. Hungry. Cold.

Gutterpunks, Portland runaways, mock-vomit alongside a too drunk friend. I walk past and debate: Coffee or smoke?

An attractive woman, my age‑ish, smiles warmly as she passes. Sex weeps, a man is already tangled in her arms. Maybe that’s where she’s at, a spider tending her web-catch, eyeing prey, praying for food.

Twinkling pianos catch my eye: Henry Millers, Steinways, an old Darwin. Their black lacquers wink the city’s lights back into the street.

Staring through the cold plate glass I’m the first to flinch.

Light rail, fifty years decayed, screams above my head, “Let me die. Forget me, please!”

I cross against an abandoned red then pause on a wet ground grate.

It feels good: Hot air blows past my chucks, gently parts my leg-hair and massages my calves. A soft red light glows, illuminating nothing, somewhere in the black below-world. No worries, we’ve sealed it with man-welds and yards upon yards of concrete and tar. Whatever lurks below, lurks alone.

“European Antiques”, distracts me, draws my attention. I make to cross the street to window shop, then, “Forget it.” I can barely tell my mumble from the breeze.

Why be disappointed by another’s junk?

Somewhere down 7^th Ave a giant sign lurks brilliantly in pink comic book neon. I imagine Frank Miller stalking this pop-monster icon and strong-arming it into a grit-violent yarn.

The city turns my ears cold.

A cardigan-cowboy clips by, his lariat poised above (and a little behind) a low-slung pair of blonde Seven jeans. Big yellow hair. Big red mouth. The better to get lost in, the better to be swallowed by.

Three more steps gets me a thirteen year old rolling by on wheels fixed in the heels of his sneakers. Birth control can ruin any moment.

—-

From here the Paramount looks old. While I eye the tired dame, searching for her secret words, an old woman watches the watcher that I’ve become. I raise a salute, she drives away.

On an overpass crossing the traffic moat which protects The Hill from downtown:

The girl across the street, the waif in tight jeans and small shiny shoes, glances at me hard, longingly. No. Negative. I’m projecting: Take me home, take me home, take me home.

For thirty-seconds she haunts me for a lifetime.

I had a friend once who insisted on being fabulous: “To be posh and super wealthy and just hangout all the time with the best people and Mai Tais … I love those!”

Our ideas seldom matched. She never left home, never sobered. I lost her in Los Angeles in one of those strange micro-canyons that lay deep and fissure-like between the cold pacific and burnt city. She fell, like Orpheus, just before the inferno’s foggy gate.

This is what I’m thinking about while the gay baritone (What else could it be?) knocks on my ears. “I’m ready to go. Don’t care what people know.”

Other passersby —them too drunk on the night— sing back their compliments, their appreciation.

“Thanks! It actually takes a lot of vocal cordal strengths to sing the way weeeeeee do!”

Bravado, thick with the moment, thick in the moment, echoes down the street. 

Home is a block, a world, away.

two

I step out into the night and the storm lifts ten feet, persistent drizzle relieves the constant downpour.

Its late, not yet dark, a benefit of a northern latitude one month before summer solstice. This part of the city is the in-between; often transited, never explored. Only the homeless bridge-people seek out these spots.

Off the beaten path: A middle of nowhere in the middle of everywhere. My belly rumbles. I pull my jacket tight, zipper it in place and start hiking.

Capitol Hill is The Hill: I find an Americano, two dollars sixty-five on the sidewalk on Broadway, three blocks later it’s cool enough to sip.

I find a patch of grass next to my favorite tree in the corner of the park above of the Egyptian. Across the street the line wraps round the block. Buses pass, one stops.

The storm lifts another ten feet and its drizzle turns to sky-spurt.

Normally I prefer to remove the plastic lids from my paper coffee cups, portable as they are. It’s part of the making comfortable ritual, part of the preparation.

From my dark vantage I watch the people-line-pede slinky one direction (forward) and then back the other direction (backwards seems reasonable). The many-footed-mammal, alive at each segment, bonded and adhered to by a magic greed.

Through the yellow-green leaves of the trees below me I watch the Egyptian open his doors, his friend the Number-Ten arrives just in time to obscure his friend’s inner sanctum.

I finish my coffee, secure my pad, pocket my pen and continue to forage.

Two-twenty will get you a slice at Mamma’s, try the: sausage, spicy Italian. I always buy two. My father use to say, “There are worse meals and uglier girls to spend five dollars on.” I always assumed he was calling me the girl. He always laughed.

No matter the time of year I always find literature from the Northwest Film Forum at Mamma’s. I never see the films, but I’ve read about all of them.

Two slices will take you to the edge of the hill. Now I’m parked on a park bench beneath a streetlamp and one-legged-overpass-troll is somewhere to my right, far in the distance, somewhere over there where the interstates converge and couple.

The night, still wet with scents of rain, darkens, shadows dapple between the frames of office buildings and compartmentalized high-rises.

From my spot I peer, unobstructed, into the interstitial spaces of this: My wet conurbation, my frigid concubine. No one fears the man on the bench with the pad & pen. Some smile knowingly, sourly. Others (all others) scurry through the lamp’s light, rabid for the dark safety.

So many rats in the night.

Blue sweatshirt, white camouflage canvas shorts, shaved head with FLOWING rat tail—

“Hey man, what’s up?”

His speech hurried, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, a red knapsack slung loose over his shoulder. He passes uncomfortably close then doubles back—

“You ride the bus man? I’m trying to unload these tickets for a hot price.”

Our eyes never meet.

“I don’t ride the bus.”

My word’s breath turns to vapor, temperature has dropped. This night’s true cold is still coming.

The dappled sky breaks smoothly, revealing beams of white moonlight. Street meat lingers in the air.

Downtown is alive. I pass blondes, brunettes, miniskirts, probable transvestites and a thousand Asian families seated neatly behind quarter inch thick industrial glass, all waiting anxiously for their New York American Cheesecake, authentic factory style.

Black men with white women, beautiful women with short men. Cologne, perfume, cigarettes, a little girl with a sucker and ponytails; everything roaring, splashing, advertizing fun.

Three years ago I quit my job in the plaza I’m seated in. It’s always warmer here, always wetter.

My boss was a North Californian tyrant married to corporate construction money and addicted to age. Skiing, work place drama, sex: All pet hobbies she kept fed in her office on the mountain.

‘Seventy minutes to blissful powder and alpine-esque dreamscapes, let winter blow the city away—‘ so goes the motto.

Closed for the summer duration, the mountain stands three thousand, seven hundred, forty-seven epic feet. Too low to keep an icecap, my city’s mountain serves its winters playground service with stoic melancholy and a resigned outlook on life and universe. All this is what my boss, Queen HR, returns to each year and every season.

Here she wallows in tanks of sin just to slake her spiteful thirst. Too miserable to stay at home, too bitter to play nice, she becomes all of our tortures—

“Okay. We need to make sure the cabins are ready! So lets clean them and make checklists of any discrepancies you find.”

“Yup.”

“There are eight cabins. If you can’t find them all here’s a radio to call for help.”

“Okay.”

“The kids’ll be here next Thursday, that’s a week from now. So we really need to make sure everything is up to snuff. Are you single?”

“What? … No. I’m not married. Why?”

“Good. I’ll need your cell number and keep that radio charged. I NEED to be able to REACH YOU!”

Q.HR always rests her arm or hand on my shoulder when we talk. She also likes to steer me by the bicep.

“You’ve never seen snow before?”

The kids arrived, en masse, Thursday ten a.m. Ninety-seven South American college kids, average age: Nineteen, equal mix of sexes.

Ninety-seven South American children that had never before seen snow.

Ninety-seven South American rich-brats that had each paid one thousand American dollars in order to come to my (our) city and “augment” the ski resort’s labor force.

Ninety-seven South Americans who barely speak English, don’t believe in birth control and expected to absolutely rage from November to April.

Ninety-seven entitled mouths, each one with a cell phone programmed to speed dial one “emergency” number: Mine.

“How many “emergencies” today?”

“Ninety-seven.”

“No. Seriously.”

“Seriously, ninety-seven.”

“Well, their all little fuckers anyways, I actually caught two of them going at in their cabin.”

“Well, it’s their cabin.”

“… like rabbits, nasty little rabbits with their … juices. Did you know most of them can’t even speak English?”

“I did notice that. Didn’t you lead the hiring team?”

“I know, right? How are they going to run the lifts or serve food if they can’t speak English?”

“ .   .   . “

“You’re right. They’re shoveling snow and flipping burgers, who gives a fuck? They don’t need to speak our language.”

And they didn’t, but they also didn’t need too to understand that this bitch who’d hired them, hated them.

She hated them for everything they were and for everything they were born to be. She hated them like she hated herself.

I quit in March after one hundred and thirty-two days of continual emergencies. If hell is the hag signing your paycheck then heaven is ninety-seven continual days of uninterrupted riding, viva la first trax!